Mary Kay O'Connor Process Safety Center: Research Program, Current Activities, and Future Direction

Abstract

The Mary Kay O'Connor Process Safety Center was established to produce engineers and practitioners trained in process safety; to provide its members and others with the research base needed to compete successfully in the rapidly growing chemical processing industry, and to provide an independent process safety resource for academia, government, and the world-wide chemical processing industries. One of the goals of the Center is to be a catalyst for the process industry to develop and maintain the culture to where safety is second nature in all activities and operations. This safety awareness culture can be accomplished gradually by the research, education, service, and training programs of the Center. In addition, changes in the engineering curriculum are required not only to offer process safety engineering and safety courses as separate and focused courses, but also to integrate process safety into the curriculum of other core courses such as thermodynamics, transport phenomena, heat transfer, etc. Finally, graduate research projects at the Master's and Ph.D. level where the thesis/ dissertation is focused on solving process safety-related problems is critical to the advancement and understanding of process safety problems and issues. The focus of this presentation is the planned programs and activities of the Mary Kay O'Connor Process Safety Center and how these programs and activities will accomplish the overall goals and mission of the Center.